I’ve recently been working on a Chatbot demo that can submit orders for souvenirs through Facebook Messenger and updates the Oracle SCM Cloud. We demoed this in Cloud World Sydney and the idea was to be able to have the attendee make an order through Messenger, then receive a QR code to claim their souvenir at the demo booth, where we show that their request had flowed into SCM.

Now the only problem is our environment automatically generates an email notification where the order is submitted. We needed to turn it off otherwise the user would receive 2 emails.

In this blog, we showcase the abilities of Oracle Integration Cloud – Process to be embedded in SaaS applications. This is useful when you need to straddle workflows across systems or when users you need to conduct an approval are outside your organisation. OIC Process is extremely powerful for application extensions, providing capabilities to deliver embeddable UIs for Forms and Task Lists as HTML5 files that can be inserted in ANY application, Oracle, non-Oracle and even on-prem. We are using Oracle Service Cloud to showcase this. Service Cloud is a Service Request SaaS CRM, typically utilized by Contact Centres. Since only Contact Centre users have access to Service Cloud, what if you need information from another department, such as Field Services/Billing or even another organisation?

Much has been written on RedThunder.blog about the Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. In this blog, I am going to get into the advanced topic of Custom Policies. You would start exploring this area when the built-in policies do not cover your use case. The power and ease of implementing Custom Policies, I believe, is a killer value proposition of this platform.

Before we proceed, it would helpful to understand the backend technology of what the API Platform is built on. API Platform built-on the heritage of the sturdy and scalable WebLogic server.

There are 3 components:

Management Portal – Used to create and manage APIs. This is an application hosted in WebLogic server, utilising WebLogic for clustering and scaling. Oracle hosts and manages this in our Public Cloud and automates the whole installation process, so you just have a make a few clicks to provision it. The Management Portal is the brains of the API Platform, registering Gateways and deploying and publishing APIs to the Gateways and Developer Portal. You can access all its functions through REST API.

Gateway Node – Holds the run-time of the API. This is based on the Oracle Communications Service Gatekeeper (OCSG) from our telco-grade suite of products. Built-on WebLogic, the Gateway Nodes can be installed on any platform on-premise or in the Cloud (e.g. Amazon, Azure, Oracle). It is packaged as a zip file downloaded from the Management Portal itself. Once installed, the Gateway calls home to the Management Server to register itself. It pulls APIs and the policies associated with it from the Cloud once they are deployed. Gateways forms a logical cluster for HA purposes, so you deploy once and the APIs propagate to all the nodes in the cluster.

The Gateway Install zip also hosts the necessary code nuggets for customisation.

Developer Portal – Used for developers to review documentation and subscribe to APIs. Also an application, this is by default hosted in the same WebLogic Server as the Management Portal. If you wish to run another Developer Portal, let’s say on-premise or customise it, you can extract the Developer Portal war from the Gateway Server install zip and host it in another WebLogic server.

Now coming to Custom Policies, they are essentially Java-code packaged as war files. The Gateway Install zip holds the code nuggets necessary to generate a Policy Stub. It also holds the necessary libraries aka Policy SDK (matching the version of the Gateway server) to compile against.

In this blog, we will use Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) and Integration Cloud Service (ICS) to automate batch uploads into Oracle ERP Cloud. We will perform this upload with invoices, a typical use-case for organisations that work with numerous vendors and would like their vendors to bulk invoice them through say an SFTP file drop.

Steps are as follows:

Drop the file into an SFTP folder that is managed by MFT

MFT picks it up and uploads it into ERP Cloud’s WebCenter Content file repository

MFT calls ICS to trigger a multi-step orchestration to load ERP Cloud

Using the ICS ERP Cloud adapter, the ICS orchestration first loads the file into staging tables and import the invoice into final tables

That is because HCM and ERP Cloud (also SCM and SalesCloud) are all Oracle Fusion Applications, modules built on the same platform. Some of you may even be on “Global Shared Instances”, essentially running both your HCM and ERP SaaSes in the same instance.

In Part 1 of MFT to HCM integration, we configured MFT to perform a batch upload of employees from an SFTP folder to HCM and informed HCM to import the data.

Once the file is placed in the source folder, its picked automatically by Oracle MFT and then transferred to the Target. After the target has successfully received the file, MFT again takes care of invoking any dependent actions. These post-processing actions include items such as decompressing, decrypting, renaming, calling a downstream action, and notifications.

MFT provides default activities, as well as a flexible callout extension framework built in Java that can utilised to call any action you wish.

Here in Part 2, we will talk about design and deployment of the Post-Processing Java Callout that is utilised to trigger the HCM Cloud ImportAndLoadData service.

As of Dec 2016 aka Release 16.4.5, the ICS Scheduler has finally arrived!

You cannot imagine how excited I am! As a regular integrator of SaaS systems, I’ve started noticing a trend where most SaaS softwares offer comprehensive REST/SOAP APIs, but wait… with a catch, they’re all passive. Meaning you can call them to get/put data, but you can’t trigger an activity from them when certain data has changed. Some of my peers have even commented that we’ve gone backwards in time before SOA where everything is batch processed.

Rant aside. To automate integration between 2 “passive” APIs, you will need some form of trigger, preferably a scheduler. ICS has had a scheduler function for File/FTP connectors for a while now. This new function applies on Orchestrations, which means you can pretty much schedule and integrate any connector.

Today I’m going to showcase creating a scheduler that will send SMSes to me every 10min. The SMS gateway is implemented using REST. You can practice this with any connection you can view the response with (Email/Database).

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